Quentin Tarantino reportedly decides The Movie Critic isn't good enough to be his final movie

Hype has, both steadily, and inevitably, been building up for Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic for a while now. It’s only natural: Not only is Tarantino coming off of one of the best films of his career, in the form of 2019's Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, but he’s also applied a huge amount of self-directed pressure on the movie by stating that it’ll be his 10th and final film.

Now, that pressure has reportedly reached a breaking point, as Deadline reports that, after at least one serious re-write, Tarantino is dropping the movie entirely in favor of… something else. In the words of the report, “He simply changed his mind.”

Now, we need to caution that this is all pretty firmly in “Sources say” territory, which means—especially since what’s being reported on is, at the end of the day, the creative mindset of one man, who has canceled, and then un-canceled, movies in the past—the info is kind of inherently unreliable. The Movie Critic was actually supposed to start filming last year, but was delayed by the SAG-AFTRA strikes; Tarantino received a tax credit to shoot the movie in California in September of 2023, and was expected to start filming on it pretty shortly. The film was rumored to star Brad Pitt—possibly, per The Hollywood Reporter, reprising his role as Cliff Booth from Hollywood, although the sheer ambiguity of that info speaks to the confusion around this whole project—along with a host of past Tarantino collaborators.

And now… Not so much. It’s a pretty wild revelation, and hard not to see in terms of Tarantino setting himself up for an intense level of scrutiny with his own statements around the project. It was, after all, only positioned as “the final film by Quentin Tarantino” because he said it was, since fans would almost certainly continue to flock to his movies for the next several decades. (The guy’s only 61, in a field that’s kinder than most to its older practitioners.) Regardless, though: Whatever Tarantino’s final film is going to be… The Movie Critic apparently isn’t it.